It didn't hurt that the University of Chicago drove most of the land ownership and maintained a massive private police force.
I'm with you, not sure what the lesson was, but it led to an integrated neighborhood.
It's nearly unbelievable that something as simple as /not allowing the posting of For Sale signs/ can quell a lot of concerns about negative changes to the neighborhood.
https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/not-in-your-front-ya...
People who grow up in singular neighbourhoods simply don't realise what they are missing in understanding each other. Attending each other's weddings, funerals; talking about political issues forms a strong bond above religious lines
1. Provide cheap insurance to homeowners against price declines, so that they would not fear the neighborhood flipping to African American and losing their investment.
2. Creating the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a essentially a non-profit real estate agency not subject to many of the discrimination laws.
3. Agressive code enforcement against apartment building owners who might let properties decline in anticipation of the neighborhood going African-American and low income, but being willing to negotiate if they put their listings exclusively with the Housing Center.
4. Testing real estate agents for violation of fair housing laws, but agreeing to let them slide if they agreed to list exclusively with the Housing Center.
5. Creating an investment vehicle to purchase blighted apartment buildings, listing exclusively through the Housing Center.
5. Making the housing center staff specifically steer based on race, but in the opposite of the normal direction. They would only show all-white buildings to black customers, and show white customers to majority black buildings. The Housing Center did similar steering for single family houses. The specific goal was "a black a block" so that most residents would have an African American neighbor, but that clusters would not form that could cause momentum for houses to sell.
6. School districts drawn to evenly spread out African Americans among all of the schools.
7. Direct community outreach with police visits and conversations with people on the block that might object to an African American resident on their block.
8. Making For Sale signs on lawns illegal.
All in all, an absolutely amazing and masterful piece of social engineering, that has not to my knowledge been replicated anywhere else. That said, this is all fairly heavy handed, and IMO goes right up to, and perhaps past the line of legality.
But the more expensive center of Oak Park is less well integrated, and some of the same city dynamics that produce disparities elsewhere are at play in Oak Park, too.
It also helps that Oak Park is tiny. You can walk across it in like 20 minutes.